Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  So where is this India we are talking about, and what is its desire?

  Geographically and politically, India has not been ‘India’ for much of the history of this land. At its most expansive, ‘India’ has included what is now Pakistan, areas of Afghanistan, Burma, Nepal and Bangladesh. The current political entity of India is the result of a bloody Partition in 1947, and consolidations through persuasion and coercion after 1947. But parts of these borders continue to be disputed by India’s neighbours. When we speak of desire in ‘India’, then, we do not stand on very firm ground. Desire in India has always been a desire that is not confined to one geographical entity alone. Instead, it has grown out of conversations across what are now physical borders. It has metamorphosed over centuries during which ideas did not require a visa to travel.

  There is a 12th-century Javanese poem, for instance, that narrates Kama being rendered bodiless by the wrath of Shiva, suggesting that ‘Indian’ influences spread early on to countries that are not geographically or politically contiguous to the current borders of India. The story of Kama being reduced to ashes by Shiva first appears in India in the Matsya Purana, thought to have been composed between 250 and 500 CE. If you jump ahead 15 centuries, then the age-old ‘Indian’ understanding of desire as not being limited to or by the body sounds uncannily like the modern psychoanalytical understanding of desire. Sigmund Freud reminds us in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) that desire is not always or only about sex. Sexual intercourse does not exhaust desire because our desire always exceeds the physical acts of sex. Even if we are married to the same person, and remain faithful to her or him for the rest of our lives, that will still not stop our desires from straying. We will continue to lust after Shah Rukh Khan or Sophia Loren even as we might stay happily married. This is the way desire operates—through fantasy rather than fact. Where would the world’s glamour industries be without it?

  Psychologist and author Sudhir Kakar notes that ‘sexuality is a system of conscious and unconscious human fantasies, arising from various sources, seeking satisfaction in diverse ways, and involving a range of excitations and activities that aim to achieve pleasure that goes beyond the satisfaction of any basic somatic need’. Sexual intercourse or even sexual acts cannot dissipate the range of feelings, thoughts and images that make up desire. Instead, desire can attach to fantasy, object, story, person, institution, idea, or all of the above. Vatsyayana would agree with Kakar’s description of sexuality as that which goes beyond somatic satisfaction. But to Kakar’s suggestion that sexuality is a ‘system’, Vatsyayana would add that desire escapes systemization. Unlike the categories within which sexual orientations can be slotted, desire spreads out, widely and unevenly.

  One of the many definitions of ‘desire’ provided by the Oxford English Dictionary is: ‘...that feeling or emotion which is directed to the attainment or possession of some object from which pleasure or satisfaction is expected.’ Desire is not (only) love, and neither is it (only) sex. Love tends to capture desire within the sentimental framework of emotions, often through marriage. And sex focuses on acts of genital intercourse that may not always be the end goal or even the basis of desire. I cannot provide a definition of desire because it is precisely the thing that eludes definition. But what this book does claim is that desire in India has been, and has had a tendency to be, messy. It exists across what we now classify as sexual identities, subjects and objects, human and non-human, historical periods, geographical sites, street foods, and religious texts. Desire is surprising: it can strike us at moments when we least expect it to. Desire travels: it cannot be contained within strict boundaries. Desire is multiple: it resists being pigeonholed into this or that thing. But across its multiple definitions, desire is related to a shiver of pleasure, a shock of pain, an intensity of recognition.

  In my case, the intensity of my desire for India is related also to my impurity as an onlooker, my mixed status as both insider and outsider. Between 1995 and 2013, I travelled every year between India and the US. These trips were intellectual and emotional journeys as much as they were physical and geopgraphical ones. I was always sad to leave Delhi, and always happy to return here. But I was also thrilled to be studying and writing and publishing in the US. For most of those years, my study of desire was focussed on Shakespeare rather than India. But what I said about desire in Shakespeare was always informed by the multiple histories with which I had grown up, histories in which Shakespeare’s praise of sexually ‘wanton words’ (this phrase was also the title of my first book) resonates with Uma’s cries of pleasure in Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, and echoes Mir’s come-hither poetry. These worlds of Indian desire are the opposite of swacch Bharat. We live in an intellectual stew that does not incline us towards the single and the clean. Rather, a tendency towards disorder is a way of life here—from the way we drive to what drives our desires.

  Very little in these pages thus has anything to do with pure objects, ideas or histories. This book also does not focus on acts leading to sexual intercourse, or descriptions of sexual intercourse itself. Instead, each chapter visits a different site—whether object, relation, act or place—that plays a significant role in our daily lives. So many of us speak grammatically-inflected languages, go to college, do yoga (not me!), have grandparents, eat paan, and obsess about our hair. But what do these everyday sites have to do with desire? Well, one of the things they do is show us how widespread the ambit of our desires is. What is striking about desire in India is just how capacious it is. So each chapter follows a different idea and traces a history of its relation to desire. But equally, I can imagine a different set of chapters that might make up the roster of this book. Chapters on beedis and hookahs, for instance, or halwa. On medicine and call centres and bazaars. On water and widows and sarees.

  Lady under a tree with a hookah.

  Miniature from Bikaner, c. 1760

  Such imaginative expansiveness is what allows for the simultaneous existence in this book of places, languages and ideas. I have finally been able to bring together my training in queer theory with Mir’s haunting passions, the Kamasutra’s range of sexualities, Greek pedagogy, Persian poetry and the British desire to codify desire. English and non-English words coexist here without either being italicized or relegated to a glossary. What this means is that our reading will be interrupted, disrupted within the sentence itself by words that might not immediately be familiar. After all, one of the aims of this book is to highlight the idea that, like the kerosene in India, desire too is adulterated, and these adulterations run deep.

  Let me end, therefore, with another example of adulterated desire, in a tale of two women. On 23 April 2017, The Tribune ran a story about a wedding in Jalandhar, Punjab. Manjit Kaur, a sub-inspector of police (some reports say she is an assistant sub-inspector), married her unnamed long-term girlfriend. Manjit (this can interchangeably be both a man’s and a woman’s name, which is common in the Sikh community) was dressed in a red turban, and wore a particularly impressive garland of money when she went in a baraat, or bridegroom’s party, to wed her bride. (I don’t think there is anywhere in the world other than North India and Pakistan where bridegrooms wear garlands made of currency notes.) So impressive was Manjit’s garland of money that it is hard to see in the photos what she is wearing underneath it. Her bride is more recognizably dressed in a red and gold salwar kameez, with lots of gold jewellery, and all the markers of a North Indian Hindu bride. The newly-weds travelled home in a chariot after the wedding ceremony—‘solemnized as per Hindu rituals’, according to The Tribune—which took place in a temple and was attended and blessed by both families.

  I would like to point out three things. First, this wedding involved a member of the police force in a country where the legal taboo around sex ‘against the order of nature’ hovers like a brooding British bird. Second, no punitive action has been taken against the married couple, even months after the event. And third, the participants in the ceremony h
ave not classified themselves as anything other than lovers in the grip of desire.

  In India, laws governing desire are usually not followed. Desires are erratic, not uniform. And passion is not easily codified. The chapters that follow are wanderings through Indian bylanes into which impure, erratic and not easily codified desires stray.

  1

  DARGAHS

  Kyaa haqeeqat kahun ki kyaa hai ishq

  Haq-shanaason ke haan khudaa hai ishq

  (What shall I say is reality and what desire?

  For those acquainted with the truth, desire is god.)

  —Mir Taqi Mir

  It is the middle of the monsoon season. For several days I have put off my trip to the Mehrauli Archaeological Park, but finally decide to brave the puddles and take the plunge. Luckily, it is a breezy morning, and my guide awaits me at a side entrance to the park. Marvelling at the fact that despite being Delhi-born and bred, I have never visited this site before, I start taking in the wonders that await us a short distance inside the boundary wall. Old walls, and entire structures in various states of dilapidation. There is a new mosque on the left, at which I will stop, but not now.

  This is the site of Lal Kot, one of the oldest versions of what was later to become Delhi. Founded by Anangpal Tomar in the 8th century, Lal Kot grew into a bustling fort-city under the Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan in the 12th century. Under the Delhi Sultanate, which replaced Chauhan Rajput rule, it became a cosmopolitan space that flourished even after the Khiljis shifted the seat of power to Siri, a new fort-city some distance away. Many of the ruins around us in Lal Kot date from the 14th and 15th centuries, but there are hints of even older habitation. There is a sign for Balban’s Tomb, built in the 13th century, which is widely regarded as the first structure in India to have made use of the arch. But before we get to Balban’s Tomb, there is a small gate to the left. We round a corner and turn in through the gate to come upon a wonderful courtyard, with a flourishing tree in the middle of it, and a shallow well-like structure to the right—the wazu khana, where the faithful cleanse themselves before offering namaz. One can still see the underground aqueducts that drained water into the tank centuries before. This is where dusty, weary travellers from afar, and energetic, spiffy pilgrims from closer by, would have come together to clean themselves before entering the old mosque that rises majestically in front us.

  A solitary watchman is on guard over this mosque. He sits in the shade provided by one of the arches, enjoying the breeze generated by the tree in the courtyard. He wanders over to chat, confirming that he does indeed get lonely in the absence of visitors. The mosque is a brilliant structure: designed by a Sufi saint named Shaikh Fazlu’llah and built around 1528, it boasts of unique architectural features, including the first recorded use in a mosque of the Rajasthani jharokha or latticed window. It is decorated also with the Star of David (or Daud), which was commonplace under the Mughals. The structure exudes a sense of serenity and beauty, but it is not at present an active mosque where the faithful can pray. Later, when I pause by the new mosque on my way out, the maulvi tells me that the old mosque is populated at night by jinns, creatures from a different dimension that have the power to pass into our world. I have heard this urban legend before, but decide to press the maulvi further. Why, I ask, would jinns come there at night, and how does the maulvi know that they do? The second question he considers unworthy of his attention, but in response to the first one, he provides a very interesting analysis. According to him, Allah does not like his places of worship to be empty, and since the old mosque is now a protected site, he sends jinns to add some life, as it were, to the place. Like people in this world, he adds, jinns too come in all shapes and sizes—some are drunkards, others gamblers, but then there are also the good-hearted ones, and they all together make up the ranks of worshippers in the mosque. Given how atmospheric the mosque is—tranquil, beautiful, caressed by the branches of an ancient tree—it is easy to believe the stories of hauntings by jinns without difficulty.

  There is another gate, leading away from the mosque to the right. After ascertaining that we would like to go through this second gate, the security guard unlocks it, leading us into a different courtyard, with wide open spaces, and a flat-roofed structure towards the back left-hand corner. The site is both bucolic—washed clothes flutter lazily in the breeze on lines just outside the courtyard—and majestic—the sculpted archways through which I look out at the lazy linen are stunning.

  But even the guard with the keys is powerless to let us into the structure around which the courtyard is built. Apparently the key to this particular building resides in the offices of the Archaeological Survey of India; it would take time, a trip to the ASI offices, and a special petition, before the doors can be opened to us.

  This building—the dargah of Jamali-Kamali—has been described as a jewel box. And naturally, like any jewel box containing precious gems, it must lie under lock and key. One can peep into the small tomb through the latticed windows that adorn three walls of the structure. Squinting through the star-shaped holes, hoping to find the light at an illuminating angle, hopping from one positon to the next, I finally see. And what a sight it is. A domed roof painted in sumptuous blue and gold, with intricate patterns traced on its arches, and inscriptions—which I later learn are from the Quran and Jamali’s poems—running around the base of the roof. What is interesting about this roof is that it is a dome only on the inside—the dargah is unusual in as much as it has a flat roof rather than a dome on the outside. What the reason for this might be, we do not know, but it seems to be a mark of humility. Rather than a tower or a dome reaching towards Allah, the Jamali-Kamali tomb has a flat roof on which to receive the word of god.

  ‘Jamali Kamali tomb’ by Varun Shiv Kapur. Source: Wikimedia Commons

  ‘Jamali’ is the pen name of Shaikh Hamid bin Fazlu’llah, a Persian Sufi poet and traveller who died in 1536. At some point in his travels he made Delhi his home and was also known as Shaikh Jalaluddin Dehlwi, or Jalal—a name meaning ‘wrath’—which he then changed to Jamali—meaning ‘splendour’ or beauty. He was also known as Shaikh Jamali Kamboh. Historically he straddled multiple reigns, beginning with the pre-Mughal Lodis at the end of the 15th century through the Mughal Emperors Babur and Humayun; he lived through several chronological periods, historical reigns, architectural styles and noms de plume. But the biggest mystery surrounding Jamali—some might say the reason why his dargah is kept under lock and key—is his relationship with the mellifluously named Kamali, alongside whom he is buried.

  There are many theories about the identity of Kamali and his relationship with Jamali. Some say Kamali was Jamali’s brother, victim of a parental desire to have rhyming names for their children. But this reason does not work since ‘Jamali’ was a name the Shaikh took on later in life. Others say, variously, that Kamali was Jamali’s best friend, a staunch disciple, a fellow poet, a local villager, and even his wife. There is no documentary evidence to provide positive identification for Kamali, but what is incontestable is that he was a man. This can be seen from the fact that both graves in the dargah have pen boxes constructed on them. Traditionally, graves housing male saints have these pen boxes on top of the stone, denoting the instrument with which the commemorated saint wrote words of wisdom during his lifetime. Graves housing women—and there are several of these in the courtyard surrounding and adjoining Jamali-Kamali’s tomb—are given flat tops to denote the paper upon which the pen writes. Interestingly, the roof of the building housing Jamali-Kamali’s graves, as we have already seen, is flat. There is thus something androgynous about the building—woman on top and man below, female flat roof on the outside and male phallic pen on the inside—that adds to the central mystery of Kamali’s identity. We do not know who Kamali is, except that he was close enough to Jamali in his life to warrant being buried next to the saint after his death. Urban legend and local chatter favour the homosexual theory that Jamali and Kamali were lovers in life and
death. But once we accept that we cannot know for certain, what remains important for us to consider is the nature of a love between two men that was intense enough to warrant burial side by side. What does their love mean? And how was it coded?

  Jamali-Kamali graves. Image courtesy: Vikramjit R. Rai

  Often described as the gay Taj Mahal, Jamali-Kamali’s tomb is understood to commemorate a same-sex attachment as intense as the one that inspired Shah Jahan to build the mausoleum for his wife; these tombs are part of the landscape of monuments that mark desire in India. Jamali-Kamali’s dargah is not open for public viewing for fear of being defaced, and it is hard to see inside the dargah, just as it is almost impossible to see anything in the actual mausoleum room of Mumtaz Mahal. But while the Taj displays all its splendours on the outside, Jamali-Kamali keeps its beauty hidden, treasures only for a privileged few to see. This secrecy is also the reason why this tomb is not always referred to as a dargah. A dargah—literally ‘door to the place’ (‘dar’ from darwaza, ‘gah’ from jagah), a place of access—refers to the shrine of a Sufi saint that is visited by pilgrims and which hosts qawwali music to produce a mystical gathering, or sama, of followers. The Jamali-Kamali tomb is also the shrine of a Sufi saint, but it is not currently a site of pilgrimage or qawwali because of its protected status—a classic case of killing history in the name of preserving it. But it clearly once used to be a gathering place for qawwals and pilgrims. Belying its current bucolic surroundings, Jamali-Kamali’s tomb was set in the middle of the still bustling fort-city of Lal Kot. And judging from the handsome courtyard that surrounds the tomb, the complex used to attract a great number of pilgrims. Equally, the courtyard has a clearly demarcated space right in front of the door to the tomb—an orange and beige chequered pattern with blue tiles still visible on a portion of it. Given that qawwali singers and musicians typically sit at the door of a dargah, one might speculate that Jamali-Kamali’s tomb was a space that created frequent and thriving samaas. No matter, then, if one views this tomb currently as being a dargah or a qabr—grave—or a mazaar—shrine—the fact remains that a highly venerated Sufi saint, with a large number of followers who commemorated his poetry in ecstatic song, is buried here. Along with his boyfriend.